Cingular Not Guilty In Driving-While-Yakking Crash

Legal Issues

from the pick-the-biggest-company-to-sue... dept

There’s a great old Bloom County strip where the the lawyer character, Steve Dallas, gets beaten up by Sean Penn for trying to snap a paparazzi style photo of a drunk Penn. The strip focuses on Steve Dallas trying to figure out “who to sue?” He goes through a variety of options and explains why they’re no good (“never sue poor people”) and finally decides that the obvious choice is to sue Nikon, the camera maker, for not putting a warning label on their cameras that photographing drunken celebrities may lead to harm. This story comes to mind following the news that a woman has sued Cingular, the mobile phone company, after a driver hit her car while talking on his mobile phone. She also sued the driver of the car, but hoped to get the big money from the wireless carrier. Even more amazing is that after losing in a lower court, she appealed thinking that higher level judges would somehow accept her reasoning. Thankfully, they didn’t. The Court of Appeals has tossed out the case as well: “A cellular phone does not cause a driver to wreck a car. Rather, it is the driver’s inattention while using the phone that may cause an accident.”